Why does the world need another blockchain?
Behind every magnitude increase in blockchain users lies an innovation that enables net-new behavior for the masses. In 2009, Bitcoin enabled anyone, anywhere to send and receive money without relying on centralized intermediaries. In 2015, Ethereum introduced smart contracts, enabling developers to build permissionless, composable financial applications.
Yet, somewhere along the way, we lost sight of building for the net-new user, of expanding the status quo of what could be built with truly trustless and expansive computation. Today’s blockchains prioritize latency and throughput, optimizing for existing users rather than innovating. While these performance improvements matter, they merely scale current use cases instead of unlocking transformative new ones.
Ritual was born from a single focus: enrich what users can do on-chain today to attract the users of tomorrow.
Our expedition began at the intersection of Crypto and Artificial Intelligence. Two things are simultaneously true: it has never been easier for developers to build with AI, crafting dynamic and personalized experiences, and it has never been more important to ensure that the AI technologies we adopt remain open, credibly neutral, and censorship resistant. To that extent, Ritual makes smart contracts actually smart, allowing users to natively tap into on-chain AI, backed by the same trustless properties of modern blockchains.
However, Ritual isn’t just focused on Crypto x AI. By optimizing our underlying architecture for any type of heterogeneous compute, Ritual hyperscales the expressive computation that can be performed on a blockchain. Ritual is the best venue not just for developers looking to harness AI, ZK, or TEEs in their applications, but also for those experimenting at the edges of the unknown, defining new ways to consume underlying infrastructure.
Our architecture efficiently prices, orchestrates, and exposes all types of compute, current or future, enabling Ritual to become the schelling point for all of web3.
Not only will end-users consume applications natively through Ritual, but other blockchains themselves symbiotically benefit through Ritual. High-performance chains that require a prover network (MegaETH, Movement, etc.), modern Rollup-as-a-Service offerings that require efficient execution of heterogeneous compute (Conduit, Caldera, etc.), and the totality of IP, monetized via a verifiable marketplace (Story, Sentient, etc.) will all use Ritual.
Why does AI need to be on-chain?
Crypto × AI
Today's developers have unprecedented access to AI tools for creating responsive, tailored user experiences. At the same time, maintaining AI systems that are transparent, unbiased, and free from undue control has become more crucial than ever.